PITTSBURGH, PA — Near-tragedy turned to joy Monday, when thousands of residents of a college dormitory were rescued from a fiery blaze by Adam Berson, a resident student. The fire, believed to have started when a cigarette was tossed carelessly into a trash receptacle, threatened to consume the building and the thousands of students within it.

Berson, watching television in the room next door with his friends, smelled something burning and noticed smoke wafting under the door of the neighboring room. “I picked up the awful odor of burning plastic and I figured that something was wrong,” the 19-year-old electrical engineering student told reporters. “Then we heard the fire alarm. Monzy opened the door and said ‘Holy shit, there’s a fire in here!’ That’s when I knew it was time to act.”Acting on the skills he had developed during his years of training as an emergency medical response technician, Berson manned a fire extinguisher and bravely approached the fiery blaze. “I could hardly breathe through the dense cloud of acrid smoke,” Berson recounted, “but I pointed the fire extinguisher at that burning wastebasket and POW! I guess I showed that fire who was boss.” Berson and his friends were then forced to evacuate the area to avoid any further inhalation of the poisonous plastic fumes.

“It was awesome,” exclaimed Ethan Bold, a sophomore CS major. “I was just chilling in Scott’s room and playing some Minesweeper when all of a sudden we were like, ‘What the hell is that nasty burning smell?’ Luckily Adam knew exactly what to do. He’s the man.”

“I guess you could say that Adam really inspired us all,” remarked Scott Wen, one of Berson’s classmates. “If he hadn’t been there, shit, I bet my room would have burned down too!”

Berson remains modest in the face of so many tributes. “It was a team effort, really,” he explained, “and without Brendan to kick open the glass on the fire extinguisher case and Monzy to kick open the door, it wouldn’t have been so easy to rescue the dorm from a fiery death.” Nevertheless, Carnegie Mellon University owes Berson an enormous debt of gratitude, so make sure that the letters of thanks keep pouring in to this address.